This is an update to the previously reported issue regarding the increased volume of unsolicited email being sent to some customers' mailboxes. A copy of the last update can be seen here:-

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1179414534.htm

Following the withdrawal of our Webmail service on Wednesday, our Senior Platform Engineers and Incident Response Teams have been working around the clock to build a replacement platform for customers. As announced in yesterday's Service Status update, this temporary solution will be based upon the SquirrelMail Webmail software. We are already familiar with the SquirrelMail platform as it is in use on our Metronet (sister brand) mail platform. It is a proven application in use by multiple ISPs around the world.

We hope to make this available as soon as possible and are currently in the process of carrying out extensive security and penetration testing. Additionally, our Quality Assurance team are currently conducting thorough testing of the SquirrelMail functionality in preparation of our roll-to-live.

We will only make the service available to customers once we are fully confident that the platform is as secure as technically possible and we have been working closely with BT Security teams to make this so.

SquirrellMail will be a temporary solution while we assess other options but we would envisage using this solution for approximately 6 months.

We would like to take this opportunity to apologise for the inconvenience that this incident has been causing customers.

We have published an FAQ of common questions relating to the incident on our Portal Discussion Forums here : http://portal.plus.net/central/forums/viewtopic.php?t=56014 We will be making this available via the Help & Support section of our website shortly.

We still plan to issue the full incident report on Tuesday 22nd May. A further update on the availability of webmail will be posted later this afternoon.

Kind Regards,

Liam Martin
Customer Support